Podhoretz, Hinderaker Question Carroll's "Well-Treated" Remarks

By: E&P Staff John Podhoretz, the newspaper columnist and regular contributor to Fox News and the The National Review, posted the following note on "The Corner" at that magazine's popular Web site, NRO, this morning following the release of kidnapped reporter Jill Carroll in Iraq:

"It's wonderful that she's free, but after watching someone who was a hostage for three months say on television she was well-treated because she wasn't beaten or killed -- while being dressed in the garb of a modest Muslim woman rather than the non-Muslim woman she actually is -- I expect there will be some Stockholm Syndrome talk in the coming days."

Asked about Carroll's clothes in an online chat today at www.washingtonpost.com, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, a former Baghdad bureau chief for The Post (now an assistant managing editor), said: "I believe Jill, like many Westerners who are in Iraq, wore Iraqi clothes to fit in and to conform to local customs. We should note that these are not the clothes she was wearing when she was abducted. Her captors -- or someone else -- presumably got her new clothes, and the only clothes they would have would be Iraqi."

Commenting on the "Stockholm Syndrome" possibility, he said that this is premature but that Carroll will have much more to say in the days ahead. Being "well-treated," he added, is a relative term.

Meanwhile, John Hinderaker at the popular conservative blog, Powerline, wrote today:

"No doubt her joy at being freed overwhelms all else, and it is probably churlish to critique her public comments. Nevertheless, I want to register a small protest against her statement, widely quoted in the press, that she was 'well treated' by her captors. This is a sentiment that one often hears from people who have been released by kidnappers; one gets the sense that the victims are grateful--understandably, perhaps--to the terrorists for letting them go.

"But the fact is that Ms. Carroll was not 'well treated' by her captors. She says that they 'never hit me. They never even threatened to hit me.' Terrific. But they did threaten to cut off her head, and kept her in fear of her life for nearly three months. To anyone who saw the videos in which she pleaded for her life, her mental distress was obvious. And the kidnappers murdered Carroll's translator in the course of capturing her."